Colorado's Northeast Corner

You are standing at the precise northeast corner of Colorado, where the state meets Nebraska. A surveyor named Oliver Chaffee set the original monument here in eighteen sixty-nine, a limestone shaft. It marked the crossing of the forty-first parallel of latitude with a meridian measured the old way, twenty-five degrees west of Washington, D.

C., long before mapmakers standardized on Greenwich, England. The shaft's four faces were chiseled with directions and distances, including the span between the fortieth and forty-first parallels.

Wind and weather wore the soft stone nearly smooth over a century. Later the broken shaft was replaced and resurveyed with modern references. The State Historical Society of Colorado and the people of Sedgwick County, near Julesburg, raised this marker to remember the lonely surveyors who fixed an empty prairie corner that still defines a state line today.